A brief-yet-ongoing journal of all things Carmi. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll reach for your mouse to click back to Google. But you'll be intrigued. And you'll feel compelled to return following your next bowl of oatmeal. With brown sugar. And milk.

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Monday, May 28, 2007

Noodles in the street

Don't shoot meShanghai, China, May 2007 [Click to enlarge]The scene: As we walked down a narrow alley on our way back from the market, I noticed a woman preparing a bowl of noodles on the none-too-clean sidewalk. On-the-street food preparation and sale was pretty common throughout the city, but this particular scene seemed to take the practice to a somewhat more bohemian extreme.

I'm no culinary whiz, but I'll admit that seeing this made my tummy turn a little. Now that I'm safely home and have the time to scan the details of the image, my queasiness only gets worse. I suspect this wouldn't pass any kind of government-sanctioned hygiene standard from back home.

But here's the rub: I wasn't home. When you travel, you eventually need to accept that standards and baselines of behavior and conduct aren't the same from place to place. And just because it seems "dirtier" here doesn't mean that it's wrong. That's the way things go, and you either learn to adjust your own baseline, or you risk going hungry.

The only problem with this image lies in the fact that she saw me pull the camera out of its bag, and covered her face. I finally got this image after we had passed her. I wonder if she thought I was going to bust her.

22 comments:

Michele sent me to see more of your view of China. That photo doesn't bother me too much. As long as they are cooked at a high enough temperature. I sometimes think the Western world is getting excessively clean, the prevalence of asthma is often thought to be due to children's immune systems not getting enough practice on real germs. And all the disinfectants etc that we use can't be good for the environment.

Hey Carmi...as a H&S officer here in the West that makes me wriggle a bit...but then, as you say, she doesn't live in the West.In some African countries, they still paint buildings using slings rather than scaffolding....

Perhaps the question should be turned around - is the West TOO hidebound by health, safety and disinfectant?

My stomach jumps around at normal food, Carmi, so I would have probably been heaving to see that bowl of noodles on the street. I cannot tolerate much that I don't cook. The exception to that rule was in Italy last Oct. Nothing there made me ill at all, and I attributed it to the fact that there are no preservatives or chemicals in the food - all is fresh.

She definitely looks uncomfortable with her picture being taken. You're lucky she wasn't like the Gullah woman in Charleston that I encountered last fall....After snapping her photo, she claimed to "put a curse on me." That'll teach me to be more careful with my lens.Food vendors...the only ones I partake of are those great hotdogs on the streets of Manhattan and our seafood vendors here on the island during festivals.

My brother has a theory when he travels. If they say ''don't drink the water'' he always drinks a little ritght away. Says that introduces his system to the foreign flora so he can build up resistance. And wouldn't you know it, everyone else gets sick but him :)

Thanks so much for the encouraging comment yesterday - how nice to hear!

The pic kind of creeped me out, but I'm surprised at how accepting most of your commenters are. I'm not nearly as picky with food as many people are, but where she is doing this makes me wonder if she dropped some on the ground, would she pick them up and add them back to the batch?

I bought a hot italian sausage from a vendor today in Toronto, and even though the city has tough health and safety laws (well, supposedly) it was the first time I wondered if i should be buying something off the street....the though left me as I devoured EVERY single bit!

No, this photo doesn't bother me. I agree with Catherine, that we tend to go to the extreme with germ killing. I guess because I grew up in a third world country, I saw this stuff all the time when I was a kid.